Joan Taylor

Joan Taylor is Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London. She has authored numerous books and articles about Jesus and his world, notably The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism (1997), Jesus and Brian: Studying the Historical Jesus via Monty Python’s Life of Brian (2015) and What did Jesus look like? (2018). She has studied questions of women and gender: Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s Therapeutae Reconsidered (2006); with Ilaria Ramelli, Patterns of Women’s Leadership in Early Christianity (2021). She is currently writing a Very Short Introduction to Mary Magdalene for the Oxford series. She also works in radio, television and film, and co-presented, with Helen Bond, Jesus’ Female Disciples: The New Evidence (2018) for Channel Four.